英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

agoraphobia [agoraphobia 词源字典]: agoraphobia: [19] Agoraphobia – fear of open spaces or, more generally, of simply being out of doors – is first referred to in an 1873 issue of the Journal of Mental Science; this attributes the term to Dr C Westphal, and gives his definition of it as ‘the fear of squares or open places’. This would be literally true, since the first element in the word represents Greek agorá ‘open space, typically a market place, used for public assemblies’ (the most celebrated in the ancient world was the Agora in Athens, rivalled only by the Forum in Rome).

The word agorá came from ageirein ‘assemble’, which is related to Latin grex ‘flock’, the source of English gregarious. Agoraphobia was not the first of the -phobias. That honour goes to hydrophobia in the mid 16th century. But that was an isolated example, and the surge of compounds based on Greek phóbos ‘fear’ really starts in the 19th century.

At first it was used for symptoms of physical illness (photophobia ‘abnormal sensitivity to light’ 1799), for aversions to other nationalities (Gallophobia 1803; the synonymous Francophobia does not appear until 1887), and for facetious formations (dustophobia, Robert Southey, 1824), and the range of specialized psychological terms familiar today does not begin to appear until the last quarter of the century (CLAUSTROPHOBIA 1879, acrophobia ‘fear of heights’ from Greek akros ‘topmost’ – see ACROBAT – 1892).
=> aggregate, allegory, gregarious, segregate[agoraphobia etymology, agoraphobia origin, 英语词源]
catamaran: catamaran: [17] Catamaran is a word borrowed from the Tamil language of the southeast coast of India. It is a compound meaning literally ‘tied wood’, made up of kattu ‘tie’ and maram ‘wood, tree’. It was first recorded in English in William Dampier’s Voyages 1697: ‘The smaller sort of Bark-logs are more governable than the others … This sort of Floats are used in many places both in the East and West Indies. On the Coast of Coromandel … they call them Catamarans’.
cider: cider: [14] Despite its seeming roots in the appleproducing English countryside, cider is a very ancient word, which has come a long way to reach us. Hebrew shēkhār meant ‘any strong drink in general’. It crops up in several places in the Bible, and was adopted by Greek and Latin translators as, respectively, sīkéra and sīcera. The Latin form was borrowed into Old French, where it became sisdre and eventually sidre.

By now it was being applied more specifically to drink made from apples, and it had that meaning when it was borrowed into English. However, its biblical associations were still sufficiently strong for it to retain its original meaning in certain contexts: for example, in 1382 John Wyclif translated Luke 1:15 (‘he shall drink neither wine nor strong drink’) as ‘he shall not drink wine and cider’.

Its original form survived for a while, too, as sicar, which did not disappear from English until the 17th century.
dome: dome: [16] Dome originally meant ‘house’ in English – it was borrowed from Latin domus ‘house’ (source of English domestic). However, in other European languages the descendants of domus had come to signify more than a humble dwelling house, and its new meanings spread to English. The word increasingly encompassed stately mansions and important places of worship. Italian duomo and German dom mean ‘cathedral’, for instance (a sense adopted by English in the late 17th and early 18th centuries), and since a leading characteristic of Italian cathedrals is their cupola, the word was soon applied to this.
=> domestic
fog: fog: [16] The word fog is something of a mystery. It first appears in the 14th century meaning ‘long grass’, a use which persists in Yorkshire fog, the name of a species of grass. This may be of Scandinavian origin. The relationship, if any, between fog ‘grass’ and fog ‘mist’ is not immediately clear, but it has been speculated that the adjective foggy, which to begin with referred to places overgrown with long grass, and then passed via ‘of grassy wetlands’ to ‘boggy, marshy’ may have given rise via this last sense to a noun fog denoting the misty exhalations from such marshy ground.

A rather far-fetched semantic chain, perhaps, lacking documentary evidence at crucial points, and perhaps Danish fog ‘spray, shower’ may be closer to the real source.
furlong: furlong: [OE] Furlong ‘eighth of a mile’, which has now virtually died out except in horse-racing terminology, is part of a vocabulary of lengthmeasuring bequeathed to us by the agricultural practices of our ancestors. It originated as an Old English compound formed from furh ‘furrow’ and lang ‘long’ – that is, the length of a furrow ploughed across a standard-sized square field of ten acres.

Since the term acre varied somewhat in its application at different times and places, the length of a furlong could not be computed with great precision from it, but in practice from about the 9th century the furlong was pegged to the stadium, a measure equal to one eighth of a Roman mile.
=> furrow, long
gazette: gazette: [17] If the Sun or the Mirror were called the 22p, they would be echoing the origins of the word gazette. In Renaissance Venice, a ‘newspaper’ was termed casually gazeta de la novita (gazeta for short), literally a ‘pennyworth of news’ – for a gazeta was the name of a small Venetian copper coin (probably a diminutive form of gazza ‘magpie’).

Italian took the word over as gazzetta, and passed it on to English via French. The verbal use of gazette, ‘announce a military promotion officially’, arises from the practice of printing such announcements in the British government newspaper, the London Gazette (first published in the 17th century). The derived gazeteer [17], ultimately from Italian gazzettiere, originally meant ‘journalist’.

Its current sense ‘index of places’ was inspired by Laurence Echard’s The Gazetteer’s; or a Newsman’s Interpreter: Being a Geographical Index 1693.
glamour: glamour: [18] Unlikely as it may seem, glamour is ultimately the same word as grammar. This seems to have been used in the Middle Ages for ‘learning’ in general, and hence, by superstitious association, for ‘magic’ (there is no actual record of this, but the related gramarye was employed in that sense). Scottish English had the form glamour for grammar (l is phonetically close to r, and the two are liable to change places), used for ‘enchantment’, or a ‘spell’, for whose introduction to general English Sir Walter Scott was largely responsible.

The literal sense ‘enchanted’ has now slipped into disuse, gradually replaced since the early 19th century by ‘delusive charm’, and latterly ‘fashionable attractiveness’.
=> grammar
hell: hell: [OE] Etymologically, hell is a ‘hidden place’. It goes back ultimately to Indo-European *kel- ‘cover, hide’, which was contributed an extraordinary number of words to English, including apocalypse, cell, cellar, conceal, helmet, hull ‘pod’, occult, and possibly colour and holster. Its Germanic descendant was *khel-, *khal-, whose derivatives included *khallō and *khaljō.

The first became modern English hall, the second modern English hell – so both hall and hell were originally ‘concealed or covered places’, although in very different ways: the hall with a roof, hell with at least six feet of earth. Related Germanic forms include German hölle, Dutch hel, and Swedish helvete (in which vete means ‘punishment’).
=> apocalypse, cell, conceal, hall, helmet, hull, occult
hospital: hospital: [13] Like hospices, hostels, and hotels, hospitals were originally simply places at which guests were received. The word comes via Old French hospital from medieval Latin hospitāle, a noun use of the adjective hospitālis ‘of a guest’. This in turn was derived from hospit-. the stem of Latin hospes ‘guest, host’.

In English, hospital began its semantic shift in the 15th century, being used for a ‘home for the elderly or infirm, or for down-and-outs’; and the modern sense ‘place where the sick are treated’ first appeared in the 16th century. The original notion of ‘receiving guests’ survives, of course, in hospitality [14] and hospitable [16]. Hospice [19] comes via French from Latin hospitium ‘hospitality’, another derivative of hospes.
=> hospice, hospitable, host, hostel, hotel
lazy: lazy: [16] Lazy is one of the problem words of English. It suddenly appears in the middle of the 16th century, and gradually replaces the native terms slack, slothful, and idle as the main word for expressing the concept ‘averse to work’, but no one knows for sure where it came from. Early spellings such as laysy led 19th-century etymologists to speculate that it may have been derived from lay, but the more generally accepted theory nowadays is that it was borrowed from Low German. Middle Low German had the similar lasich ‘lazy, loose’, which may go back to an Indo-European form denoting ‘slack’.
loo: loo: [20] Loo presents one of the more celebrated puzzles of English etymology. Not the least of its problematical points is that there is no reliable evidence of its existence before the 1920s, whereas most of its suggested sources have a more dated air than that. Amongst them, the most widely touted is of course gardy loo!, a shout of warning (based on French gardez l’eau ‘beware of the water’) supposedly used when emptying chamber pots from upper-storey windows in the days before modern plumbing; but that is chronologically most unlikely.

Other possibilities are that it is short for Waterloo, which was a trade name for cast-iron lavatory cisterns in the early part of the 20th century (‘O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset’, James Joyce, Ulysses 1922), and that it comes from louvre, from the use of slatted screens for a makeshift lavatory. But perhaps the likeliest explanation is that it derives from French lieux d’aisances, literally ‘places of ease’, hence ‘lavatory’ (perhaps picked up by British servicemen in France during World War I).
moss: moss: [OE] The prehistoric Germanic ancestor of moss was *musam. This had two distinct meanings: ‘swamp’ and ‘moss’. It is not altogether clear which was primary, but it seems more probable than not that ‘moss’ (a plant which frequents damp places) was derived from ‘swamp’. The only meaning recorded for its Old English descendant mos was ‘swamp’ (which survives in place-names), but no doubt ‘moss’ (not evidenced before the 14th century) was current too.

Words from the same ultimate source to have found their way into English include mire [14] (borrowed from Old Norse mýrr ‘swamp’), mousse [19] (borrowed from French, which got it from Middle Low German mos ‘moss’), and litmus [16] (whose Old Norse source litmosi meant literally ‘dye-moss’ – litmus is a dye extracted from lichens).
=> litmus, mire, mousse
nylon: nylon: [20] English has a long history of naming fabrics after their places of origin: denim from Nîmes, for instance, muslin from Mosul, and calico from Calicut in India. It is not surprising, therefore, that the popular myth has grown up that nylon took its name from New York (ny-) and London (-lon). The truth, however, is more prosaic. Du Pont, nylon’s inventors, took the element -on (as in cotton and rayon) and simply added the arbitrary syllable nyl-. The word was coined in 1938, and its plural was in use for ‘nylon stockings’ as early as 1940.
pilgrim: pilgrim: [12] Etymologically, a pilgrim is someone who goes on a journey. The word comes via Provençal pelegrin from Latin peregrīnus ‘foreign’. This was a derivative of pereger ‘on a journey, abroad’, a compound formed from per ‘through’ and ager ‘country’ (source of English agriculture). When it arrived in English it was still being used for ‘traveller’ (a sense which survives in the related peregrinations [16]), but the specific ‘one who journeys for religious purposes’ was well established by the 13th century.

The peregrine falcon [14] got its name because falconers took its young for hunting while they were ‘journeying’ from their breeding places, rather than from their nests.
=> peregrine
savage: savage: [13] A savage is etymologically someone who comes from the ‘woods’ – woodlands being anciently viewed as places of untamed nature, beyond the pale of civilized human society. The word comes via Old French sauvage from Vulgar Latin *salvāticus, an alteration of Latin silvāticus ‘of the woods, wild’. This was a derivative of silva ‘woods, forest’ (source of English sylvan [16]), a word of uncertain origin.
=> sylvan
tram: tram: [16] Tram was borrowed from Middle Low German or Middle Dutch trame ‘balk of timber, beam’, a word of unknown origin. It was originally used in English for the ‘shafts’ of a cart, and then for the cart itself. The track on which such carts ran in mines and similar places came to be known as tramlines, and this term was adopted in the 19th century for a track used for passenger road vehicles. These in turn were called tramcars, or trams for short.
usher: usher: [14] An usher is etymologically a ‘doorkeeper’. The word comes via Anglo-Norman usser from medieval Latin ūstārius, an alteration of classical Latin ōstārius ‘door-keeper’. This was derived from ōstium ‘door’, which in turn was based on ōs ‘mouth’ (source of English oral). The usher’s job-description gradually broadened out from standing at the door to accompanying visitors inside and showing them to their places, which led in the 16th century to the emergence of the verb usher.
=> oral
acrophobia (n.): "morbid fear of heights," 1887, medical Latin, from Greek akros "at the end, the top" (see acrid) + -phobia "fear." Coined by Italian physician Dr. Andrea Verga in a paper describing the condition, from which Verga himself suffered.
In this paper, read somewhat over a year ago at the congress of alienists at Pavia, the author makes confession of his own extreme dread of high places. Though fearless of the contagion of cholera, he has palpitations on mounting a step-ladder, finds it unpleasant to ride on the top of a coach or to look out of even a first-story window, and has never used an elevator. ["American Journal of Psychology," Nov. 1888, abstract of Verga's report]
amenities (n.): "creature comforts of a town, house, etc." 1908, plural of amenity. Latin amoena, plural of amoenus, also was used as a noun with a sense of "pleasant places."
America: 1507, in Cartographer Martin Waldseemüller's treatise "Cosmographiae Introductio," from Modern Latin Americanus, after Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) who made two trips to the New World as a navigator and claimed to have discovered it. His published works put forward the idea that it was a new continent, and he was first to call it Novus Mundus "New World." Amerigo is more easily Latinized than Vespucci.

The name Amerigo is Germanic, said to derive from Gothic Amalrich, literally "work-ruler." The Old English form of the name has come down as surnames Emmerich, Emery, etc. The Italian fem. form merged into Amelia.

Colloquial pronunciation "Ameri-kay," not uncommon 19c., goes back to at least 1643 and a poem that rhymed the word with away. Amerika "U.S. society viewed as racist, fascist, oppressive, etc." first attested 1969; the spelling is German, but may also suggest the KKK.
It is interesting to remember that the song which is essentially Southern -- "Dixie" -- and that which is essentially Northern -- "Yankee Doodle" -- never really had any serious words to them. ["The Bookman," June 1910]

FREDONIA, FREDONIAN, FREDE, FREDISH, &c. &c.
These extraordinary words, which have been deservedly ridiculed here as well as in England, were proposed sometime ago, and countenanced by two or three individuals, as names for the territory and people of the United States. The general term American is now commonly understood (at least in all places where the English language is spoken,) to mean an inhabitant of the United States; and is so employed, except where unusual precision of language is required. [Pickering, 1816]
astronomer (n.): late 14c., from astronomy (q.v.), replacing French import astronomyen (c. 1300), which, had it survived, probably would have yielded *astronomian. Still in Shakespeare used in places where we would write astrologer.
Baedeker: "travel guide," 1863, from German printer and bookseller Karl Baedeker (1801-1859) whose popular travel guides began the custom of rating places with one to four stars. The Baedeker raids by the Luftwaffe in April and May 1942 targeted British cultural and historical sites.
boom (v.): mid-15c., earliest use was for bees and wasps, probably echoic of humming. The meaning "make a loud noise" is 15c. Compare bomb. Meaning "to burst into prosperity" (of places, businesses, etc.) is 1871, American English. Related: Boomed; booming. Boom box first attested 1978.
brief (adj.): late 13c., from Latin brevis (adj.) "short, low, little, shallow," from PIE *mregh-wi-, from root *mregh-u- "short" (cognates: Greek brakhys "short," Old Church Slavonic bruzeja "shallow places, shoals," Gothic gamaurgjan "to shorten").
caddie (n.): 1630s, Scottish form of French cadet (see cadet). Originally "person who runs errands;" meaning of "golfer's assistant" is 1851. A letter from Edinburgh c. 1730 describes the city's extensive and semi-organized "Cawdys, a very useful Black-Guard, who attend ... publick Places to go at Errands; and though they are Wretches, that in Rags lye upon the Stairs and in the Streets at Night, yet are they often considerably trusted .... This Corps has a kind of Captain ... presiding over them, whom they call the Constable of the Cawdys."
caller (n.): c. 1500, "one who proclaims," agent noun from call (v.). Meaning "one who announces step changes at a dance" is recorded from 1882; "one who places a telephone call," 1898. Meaning "a social visitor" is attested from 1786.
Castile: medieval Spanish county and later kingdom, from Vulgar Latin castilla, from Latin castella, plural of castellum "castle, fort, citadel, stronghold" (see castle (n.)); so called in reference to the many fortified places there during the Moorish wars. The name in Spanish is said to date back to c.800. Related: Castilian. As a fine kind of soap, in English from 1610s.
Charles's Wain (n.): Old English Carles wægn, a star-group associated in medieval times with Charlemagne, but originally with the nearby bright star Arcturus, which is linked by folk etymology to Latin Arturus "Arthur." Which places the seven-star asterism at the crux of the legendary association (or confusion) of Arthur and Charlemagne. Evidence from Dutch (cited in Grimm, "Teutonic Mythology") suggests that it might originally have been Woden's wagon. More recent names for it are the Plough (by 15c., chiefly British) and the Dipper (19c., chiefly American).

The seven bright stars in the modern constellation Ursa Major have borne a dual identity in Western history at least since Homer's time, being seen as both a wagon and a bear: as in Latin plaustrum "freight-wagon, ox cart" and arctos "bear," both used of the seven-star pattern, as were equivalent Greek amaxa (Attic hamaxa) and arktos.

The identification with a wagon is easy to see, with four stars as the body and three as the pole. The identification with a bear is more difficult, as the figure has a tail longer than its body. As Allen writes, "The conformation of the seven stars in no way resembles the animal,--indeed the contrary ...." But he suggests the identification "may have arisen from Aristotle's idea that its prototype was the only creature that dared invade the frozen north." The seven stars never were below the horizon in the latitude of the Mediterranean in Homeric and classical times (though not today, due to precession of the equinoxes). See also Arctic for the identification of the bear and the north in classical times.

A variety of French and English sources from the early colonial period independently note that many native North American tribes in the northeast had long seen the seven-star group as a bear tracked by three hunters (or a hunter and his two dogs).

Among the Teutonic peoples, it seems to have been only a wagon, not a bear. A 10c. Anglo-Saxon astronomy manual uses the Greek-derived Aretos, but mentions that the "unlearned" call it "Charles's Wain":
Arheton hatte an tungol on norð dæle, se haefð seofon steorran, & is for ði oþrum naman ge-hatan septemtrio, þone hatað læwede meon carles-wæn." ["Anglo-Saxon Manual of Astronomy"]
[Septemtrio, the seven oxen, was another Roman name.] The star picture was not surely identified as a bear in English before late 14c.

The unlearned of today are corrected that the seven stars are not the Great Bear but form only a part of that large constellation. But those who applied the name "Bear" apparently did so originally only to these seven stars, and from Homer's time down to Thales, "the Bear" meant just the seven stars. From Rome to Anglo-Saxon England to Arabia to India, ancient astronomy texts mention a supposed duplicate constellation to the northern bear in the Southern Hemisphere, never visible from the north. This perhaps is based on sailors' tales of the Southern Cross.
check (v.1): late 15c., in chess, "to attack the king; to put (the opponent's king) in check;" earlier (late 14c.), "to stop, arrest; block, barricade;" see check (n.1). A player in chess limits his opponent's ability to move when he places his opponent's king in check. All the other senses seem to have developed from the chess sense: "To arrest, stop;" then "to hold in restraint" (1620s); and finally "to hold up or control" (an assertion, a person, etc.) by comparison with some authority or record, 1690s. Hence, to check off (1839); to check up (1889); to check in or out (in a hotel, of a library book, etc., by 1918). To check out (something) "to look at, investigate" is from 1959. Related: Checked; checking.
chestnut (n.): 1560s, from chesten nut (1510s), with superfluous nut (n.) + Middle English chasteine, from Old French chastain (12c., Modern French châtaigne), from Latin castanea "chestnut, chestnut tree," from Greek kastaneia, which the Greeks thought meant either "nut from Castanea" in Pontus, or "nut from Castana" in Thessaly, but probably both places are named for the trees, not the other way around, and the word is borrowed from a language of Asia Minor (compare Armenian kask "chestnut," kaskeni "chestnut tree"). In reference to the dark reddish-brown color, 1650s. Applied to the horse-chestnut by 1832.

Slang sense of "venerable joke or story" is from 1885, explained 1888 by Joseph Jefferson (see "Lippincott's Monthly Magazine," January 1888) as probably abstracted from the 1816 melodrama "The Broken Sword" by William Dimond where an oft-repeated story involving a chestnut tree figures in an exchange between the characters "Captain Zavior" and "Pablo":
Zav. Let me see--ay! it is exactly six years since that peace being restored to Spain, and my ship paid off, my kind brother offered me a snug hammock in the dwelling of my forefathers. I mounted a mule at Barcelona and trotted away for my native mountains. At the dawn of the fourth day's journey, I entered the wood of Collares, when, suddenly, from the thick boughs of a cork-tree--
Pab. [Jumping up.] A chesnut, Captain, a chesnut!
Zav. Bah, you booby! I say, a cork!
Pab. And I swear, a chesnut. Captain, this is the twenty-seventh time I have heard you relate this story, and you invariably said, a chesnut, till now.
Jefferson traced the connection through William Warren, "the veteran comedian of Boston" who often played Pablo in the melodrama.
columbarium (n.): "subterranean sepulchre in ancient Roman places with niches for urns holding remains," neuter of Latin columbarius, "dove-cote" (so called from resemblance), literally "pertaining to doves;" from columba "dove." Literal sense of "dove-cote" is attested in English from 1881.
Columbia: poetic name for United States of America, earlier for the British colonies there, 1730s, also the nation's female personification, from name of Christopher Columbus (also see Colombia) with Latin "country" ending -ia. A popular name for places and institutions in the U.S. in the post-Revolutionary years, when former tributes to king and crown were out of fashion: such as Columbia University (New York, U.S.) founded in 1754 as King's College; re-named 1784. Also District of Columbia (1791, as Territory of Columbia); "Hail, Columbia" (Joseph Hopkinson, 1798), Barlow's "Columbiad" (1809).
corduroy (n.): 1780, probably from cord + obsolete 17c. duroy, name of a coarse fabric made in England, which is of unknown origin. Folk etymology is from *corde du roi "the king's cord," but this is not attested in French, where the term for the cloth was velours à côtes. Applied in U.S. to a road of logs across swampy ground (1780s) on similarity of appearance.
CORDUROY ROAD. A road or causeway constructed with logs laid together over swamps or marshy places. When properly finished earth is thrown between them by which the road is made smooth; but in newly settled parts of the United States they are often left uncovered, and hence are extremely rough and bad to pass over with a carriage. Sometimes they extend many miles. They derive their name from their resemblance to a species of ribbed velvet, called corduroy. [Bartlett]
cosmology (n.): 1650s, from Modern Latin cosmologia, from Greek kosmos (see cosmos) + -logia "discourse" (see -logy). Related: Cosmological; cosmologist.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

[Robert Frost, from "Desert Places," 1936]
covenant (n.): c. 1300, from Old French covenant "agreement," originally present participle of covenir "agree, meet," from Latin convenire "come together" (see convene). Applied in Scripture to God's arrangements with man as a translation of Latin testamentum, Greek diatheke, both rendering Hebrew berith (though testament also is used for the same word in different places).
cracker (n.2): Southern U.S. derogatory term for "poor, white trash" (1766), probably an agent noun from crack (v.) in the sense "to boast" (as in not what it's cracked up to be). Compare Latin crepare "to rattle, crack, creak," with a secondary figurative sense of "boast of, prattle, make ado about."
I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their places of abode. [1766, G. Cochrane]
But DARE compares corn-cracker "poor white farmer" (1835, U.S. Midwest colloquial). Especially of Georgians by 1808, though often extended to residents of northern Florida. Another name in mid-19c. use was sand-hiller "poor white in Georgia or South Carolina."
Not very essentially different is the condition of a class of people living in the pine-barrens nearest the coast [of South Carolina], as described to me by a rice-planter. They seldom have any meat, he said, except they steal hogs, which belong to the planters, or their negroes, and their chief diet is rice and milk. "They are small, gaunt, and cadaverous, and their skin is just the color of the sand-hills they live on. They are quite incapable of applying themselves steadily to any labor, and their habits are very much like those of the old Indians." [Frederick Law Olmsted, "A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States," 1856]
Cuzco: city in Peru, former capital of the Inca Empire, from Quechua (Inca), literally "navel," in a figurative meaning "center" (of the world, as the navel is the center of the body). Other places known as "navel of the world" include Delphi, Jerusalem, Rome, Easter Island, and Mount Kailash in Tibet.
Dachau: town in Bavaria, Germany, from Old High German daha "clay" + ouwa "island," describing its situation on high ground by the Amper River. Infamous as the site of a Nazi concentration camp nearby, opened in 1933 as a detention site for political prisoners and surrendered to the U.S. Army April 29, 1945. Not a death camp per se, but as it was one of the places where inmates from other camps were sent as the Reich collapsed at the end of the war, and as it was one of the few large camps overrun by British or American forces, it has come to symbolize Nazi atrocities in many minds in the West. "Arbeit Macht Frei" was spelled out in metal on the gate (as it was on other concentration camps, such as Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt).
dead (adj.): Old English dead "dead," also "torpid, dull;" of water, "still, standing," from Proto-Germanic *daudaz (cognates: Old Saxon dod, Danish død, Swedish död, Old Frisian dad, Middle Dutch doot, Dutch dood, Old High German tot, German tot, Old Norse dauðr, Gothic dauþs "dead"), from PIE *dhou-toz-, from root *dheu- (3) "to die" (see die (v.)).

Meaning "insensible" is first attested early 13c. Of places, "inactive, dull," from 1580s. Used from 16c. in adjectival sense of "utter, absolute, quite" (as in dead drunk, first attested 1590s; dead heat, 1796). As an adverb, from late 14c. Dead on is 1889, from marksmanship. Dead duck is from 1844. Dead letter is from 1703, used of laws lacking force as well as uncollected mail. Phrase in the dead of the night first recorded 1540s. Dead soldier "emptied liquor bottle" is from 1913 in that form; the image is older.
For but ich haue bote of mi bale I am ded as dorenail (c. 1350).
deadline (n.): "time limit," 1920, American English newspaper jargon, from dead (adj.) + line (n.). Perhaps influenced by earlier use (1864) to mean the "do-not-cross" line in Civil War prisons, which figured in the Wirz trial.
And he, the said Wirz, still wickedly pursuing his evil purpose, did establish and cause to be designated within the prison enclosure containing said prisoners a "dead line," being a line around the inner face of the stockade or wall enclosing said prison and about twenty feet distant from and within said stockade; and so established said dead line, which was in many places an imaginary line, in many other places marked by insecure and shifting strips of [boards nailed] upon the tops of small and insecure stakes or posts, he, the said Wirz, instructed the prison guard stationed around the top of said stockade to fire upon and kill any of the prisoners aforesaid who might touch, fall upon, pass over or under across the said "dead line" .... ["Trial of Henry Wirz," Report of the Secretary of War, Oct. 31, 1865]
distance (n.): late 13c., "quarrel, estrangement, discord, strife," from Old French destance (13c.), from Latin distantia "a standing apart," from distantem (nominative distans) "standing apart, separate, distant," present participle of distare "stand apart," from dis- "apart, off" (see dis-) + stare "to stand," from PIE root *sta- "to stand, set down, make or be firm" (see stet).

Meaning "remoteness, space between things or places" is late 14c. The figurative sense of "aloofness" is the same as in stand-offish. Phrase go the distance (1930s) seems to be originally from the prize ring, where the word meant "scheduled length of a bout."
doily (n.): 1714, short for doily-napkin (1711), from doily "thin, woolen fabric;" supposedly from Doiley, surname of a 17c.-early 18c. dry-goods dealer on London's Strand. Doily earlier meant "genteel, affordable woolens" (1670s), evidently from the same source. The surname is d'Ouilly, from one of several places called Ouilly in Normandy.
dollar (n.): 1550s, from Low German daler, from German taler (1530s, later thaler), abbreviation of Joachimstaler, literally "(gulden) of Joachimstal," coin minted 1519 from silver from mine opened 1516 near Joachimstal, town in Erzgebirge Mountains in northwest Bohemia. German Tal is cognate with English dale.

The thaler was a large silver coin of varying value in the German states (and a unit of the German monetary union of 1857-73 equal to three marks); it also served as a currency unit in Denmark and Sweden. English colonists in America used the word in reference to Spanish pieces of eight. Due to extensive trade with the Spanish Indies and the proximity of Spanish colonies along the Gulf Coast, the Spanish dollar was probably the coin most familiar in the American colonies and the closest thing to a standard in all of them; it was used in the government's records of public debt and expenditures; it had the added advantage of not being British. The Continental Congress in 1786 adopted dollar as a unit when it set up the modern U.S. currency system, which was based on the suggestion of Gouverneur Morris (1782) as modified by Thomas Jefferson. None were circulated until 1794 .
When William M. Evarts was Secretary of State he accompanied Lord Coleridge on an excursion to Mount Vernon. Coleridge remarked that he had heard it said that Washington, standing on the lawn, could throw a dollar clear across the Potomac. Mr. Evarts explained that a dollar would go further in those days than now. [Walsh]
Phrase dollars to doughnuts attested from 1890; dollar diplomacy is from 1910. The dollar sign ($) is said to derive from the image of the Pillars of Hercules, stamped with a scroll, on the Spanish piece of eight. However, according to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing of the U.S. Department of the Treasury:
[T]he most widely accepted explanation is that the symbol is the result of evolution, independently in different places, of the Mexican or Spanish "P's" for pesos, or piastres, or pieces of eight. The theory, derived from a study of old manuscripts, is that the "S" gradually came to be written over the "P," developing a close equivalent of the "$" mark. It was widely used before the adoption of the United States dollar in 1785.
dry (adj.): Old English dryge, from Proto-Germanic *draugiz (cognates: Middle Low German dröge, Middle Dutch druge, Dutch droog, Old High German trucchon, German trocken, Old Norse draugr), from Germanic root *dreug- "dry."

Meaning "barren" is mid-14c. Of humor or jests, early 15c. (implied in dryly); as "uninteresting, tedious" from 1620s. Of places prohibiting alcoholic drink, 1870 (but dry feast, one at which no liquor is served, is from late 15c.; colloquial dry (n.) "prohibitionist" is 1888, American English). Dry goods (1708) were those measured out in dry, not liquid, measure. Dry land (that not under the sea) is from early 13c. Dry run is from 1940s.
elsewhere (n.): "in another place, in other places," c. 1400, elswher, from Old English elles hwær (see else + where). Related: Elsewhither (Old English elleshwider.
erogenous (adj.): "inducing erotic sensation or sexual desire," 1889, from Greek eros "sexual love" (see Eros) + -genous "producing." A slightly earlier variant was erogenic (1887), from French érogénique. Both, as OED laments, are improperly formed. Erogenous zone attested by 1905.
In this connection reference may be made to the well-known fact that in some hysterical subjects there are so-called "erogenous zones" simple pressure on which suffices to evoke the complete orgasm. There is, perhaps, some significance, from our present point of view, in the fact that, as emphasized by Savill ("Hysterical Skin Symptoms," Lancet, January 30 1904) the skin is one of the very best places to study hysteria. [Havelock Ellis, "Studies in the Psychology of Sex," 1914]
evening (n.): from Old English æfnung "the coming of evening, sunset, time around sunset," verbal noun from æfnian "become evening, grow toward evening," from æfen "evening" (see eve). As a synonym of even (n.) in the sense "time from sunset to bedtime," it dates from mid-15c. and now entirely replaces the older word in this sense. Another Old English noun for "evening" was cwildtid.
extra: 1650s as a stand-alone adjective; also used as an adverb and noun in 17c. (see extra-); modern usages -- including sense of "minor performer in a play" (1777) and "special edition of a newspaper" (1793) -- probably all are from shortenings of extraordinary, which in 18c. was used extensively as noun and adverb in places extra would serve today.
factitious (adj.): 1640s, "made by or resulting from art, artificial," from Latin facticius/factitius "artificial," from factus "elaborate, artistic," past participle adjective from facere "to make, do; perform; bring about; endure, suffer; behave; suit, be of service" (source of French faire, Spanish hacer), from PIE root *dhe- "to put, to set, to do" (cognates: Sanskrit dadhati "puts, places;" Avestan dadaiti "he puts;" Old Persian ada "he made;" Hittite dai- "to place;" Greek tithenai "to put, set, place;" Lithuanian deti "to put;" Polish dziać się "to be happening;" Russian delat' "to do;" Old High German tuon, German tun, Old Saxon, Old English don "to do;" Old Frisian dua, Old Swedish duon, Gothic gadeths "a doing;" Old Norse dalidun "they did"). Related: Factitiously; factitiousness.